The Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Assn. is refusing to disclose how much its retirees are receiving, even as other counties have agreed to make pension information public. In the last two months, appeals courts have ordered retirement associations in Sacramento and San Diego counties to disclose the information, and agencies in other California counties are complying with requests to release information on the pensions of retirees. But the Los Angeles County retirement association has had a long-standing policy of refusing to identify by name how much county retirees are receiving.

Seventy-five retired NFL players have filed suit against the league, claiming it has known the danger of concussions for decades and concealed that information from players. The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges the NFL "knew as early as the 1920s of the harmful effects on a player's brain of concussions," but until June 2010 the league "concealed these facts from coaches, trainers, players, and the public. " Among the players listed as plaintiffs are former NFL standouts Raymond Clayborn , Ottis Anderson and Mark Duper , and most players have listed their wives as co-plaintiffs.

They were two old friends catching up over coffee, retirees swapping stories and gasping at the unfolding nuclear nightmare at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. But instead of merely throwing their hands up over the disaster that shook the plant in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Nobuhiro Shiotani and Yasuteru Yamada, both 72-year-old scientists, decided they could do something to help. They devised a plan that some have called heroic, others misguided and suicidal.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed legislation Tuesday that would require government workers to pay more for healthcare and pensions, making the state among the largest in the nation to roll back employee benefits to offset fiscal woes. "New Jersey has once again become a model for America," said Christie, a Republican, who won support from two key Democrats to overcome labor union opposition. The measure was the latest setback for unions, which lost battles to prevent Republican-run state governments in Ohio and Wisconsin from enacting legislation that limited public employees' collective bargaining rights.

In 1904, when soldiers from the Civil and Spanish-American wars settled into the Veterans Home in West Los Angeles, they brought Eastern fox squirrels with them as pets (or possibly as future dinners) from Kentucky and Tennessee. Last week in the Toluca Woods section of North Hollywood, Beverlee Nelson's prized apricot crop was nearly destroyed. What's the connection? The squirrels got loose in 1904, according to a recent blog post by Lila Higgins of the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park.

Some of California's largest counties — including Los Angeles — could be forced to reveal the names and retirement benefits of tens of thousands of public employees under an appeals court ruling. The ruling, issued last week by the 3rd District Court of Appeal, marks the first time an appeals court has ordered the pension information released and came despite arguments from county officials and labor unions that it would violate the privacy of local government employees across the state.

One hundred retired FBI agents, many long past their crime-fighting days, are rallying this spring in an effort to exonerate a disgraced former agent from Boston who ran one of the bureau's most controversial informant operations. They call themselves the Former FBI Agents for Justice for John. Among them are two retired FBI deputy directors and another who became associate attorney general in Washington. Twice-convicted Agent John J. Connolly Jr. discredited the FBI. A son of South Boston, he turned the leaders of the Irish criminal underworld into government informants on their Italian American counterparts, and then was convicted of tipping them off to imminent arrest as well as taking payoffs from them even as they continued to kill people.

The Sun City community here has just about anything active seniors could want: a fitness center, swimming pools and an array of classes including dance, aerobics, personal finance and computer skills. Outside, residents play pickleball in the warm air, near the amphitheater where a Jimmy Buffett tribute band will kick off the summer season. Golf carts hum on the streets, and in the main lodge's parking lot, spaces for the handicapped stretch toward the horizon. In the neat neighborhoods, there's nary a basketball hoop or spare toy in sight.

To properly know who Ronnie Lott is, and what he has become, it is important to know who he was. Also, it needs to be established that Lott will be 52 on May 8, which makes him, in the ongoing discussion of the long-term impact of NFL injuries, a tweener. He is between the days when the crippling hits occurred and the days they actually become crippling. He says he expects to really feel them in his 60s. "I know what's coming," Lott says. This is a hard subject for Lott because he is a hard guy. Raised in a military family and moving around as a child, he was perhaps the best football player to come out of Fontana, and Eisenhower High.